Good news everyone, i remain addicted to building my own desktop publishing tools and so can you be!
It’s actually quite simple: head on over to odroid.co.uk/ODROID-C4 and buy one, preferably with a Metal case
choose the right power supply for your country
gently place the board aligned with the four screw holes in the case and fasten it
hook one side of the case to the metal hooks on one side and lift it over the hooks on the other
You’ve just build a Linux MiniPC with the following specifications:
- 2Ghz ARM Quadcore CPU
- 4Gig SDRAM
- Mali-G31 GPU onboard graphics card
That onboard Mali graphics card is quite the extra_feature of this MiniPC as it alignes the ARM CPU used in most Android phones with the graphics card used in most Android phones. You are now ready to use open source Android Studio for building Android apps on the same hardware as it is supposed to be published for, how cool is that?
And the speed! My Android phone camera was not able to capture the speed of this graphics card on a 24″ monitor:
To set it up:
buy a premium quality 32Gb miniSDcard
buy a USB miniSD cardreader
load the miniSDcard into the miniSDcard reader
download Manjaro XFCE for Odroid C4
download Raspberry Pi imager
remove all your USB-sticks
insert the miniSDcard reader
open Raspberry Pi Imager
choose “use custom”
load the system image you’ve downloaded from Manjaro
choose your miniSDcard reader as storage
hit “write”
wait until the process is finished
remove the miniSDcard reader
retrieve the miniSDcard from it
put it in the Odroid C4 miniSDcard-slot
attach the monitor with an HDMI-cable
attach USB peripherals
plug the powersupply in a socket
plug the small cable plug in the Odroid C4 power inlet
The Manjaro install program starts up which is pretty much selfexplanatory, choose open source drivers and hit Enter or just watch it count down.
I will write a separate article about general setup, configuration and security hardening of Linux though
you should install gufw firewall and enable it right away !
For the backup of the system miniSD, use Win32Imager. I recommended Raspberry Pi’s image writer because it’s the only beginners way to format the entire miniSD on Windows if things go south. Foss also made an excellent guide about the graphical installer once Manjaro is booted: itsfoss.com/install-manjaro-linux/
I made this workstation out of it, shows what it is about, open source desktop publishing capability. It should also be great as a workstation for 3D-printing and fast enough to do some solid Blender Greasepencil animating, more on that later.
